Description
Pluriversal politics has received more attention in theoretical debates on the reverberations of European colonialism and imperialism (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018; Hutchings, 2019; Kothari et al., 2019; Mignolo, 2018; Reiter, 2018). This notion is not only associated with the critique of European modernity by revealing its colonial and imperial foundations but also with the encouragement of horizontal dialogues between different traditions of socio-political thought. The assumption here is that, despite a violent project of civilisation, there still exist alternative worlds, such as Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, with their own ontological, epistemological and socio-political proposals. These worlds may offer less destructive proposals to the crises of modern capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy and anthropocentrism.
In this paper, I explore the implications of this framework for political reconciliation. One may argue that political reconciliation consists in a world in which many worlds coexist together without one subsuming the others. This presupposes the deployment of dialogical and democratic methods of intercultural translation or border thinking in the recuperation of subaltern worlds. This is what I call here “pluriversal reconciliation”. I argue that pluriversal politics offers a conception of political reconciliation that is better equipped to deal with some post-war, post-dictatorial and post-colonial questions. There are two reasons for this: (1) pluriversal reconciliation deals with the socio-political, epistemic and ontological dimensions of violence. (2) Its emphasis on subaltern worlds seeks to unearth realistic, and perhaps less destructive, alternatives to the hegemonic order.
The paper proceeds as follows. In the first section, I introduce the pluriverse as one of the contributions of decolonial studies in recent decades. The second section revolves around the notion of pluriversal politics and its democratic potential for political reconciliation. The last section outlines the term “pluriversal reconciliation”. I introduce this conception, identify its most salient features and offer some illustrations of its theoretical potential.
